Sales Excellence: What Is It and How You Can Attain It

Defining and achieving sales excellence is the ultimate business challenge.

However, companies that successfully characterize a vision of sales excellence and implement policies and practices to achieve it can count on a massive return on investment as booming performance becomes business as usual.

Learn what sales excellence is, how to measure it, and how to attain it.

What is Sales Excellence?

A company’s salesforce embodies sales excellence when they consistently reach and exceed sales targets and key performance metrics. Pursuing sales excellence means developing strategic onboarding practices, providing consistent and high-value training, and establishing open communication between teams and departments.

Four Ways To Measure Sales Excellence

Sales excellence may manifest differently across industries and even between competitors. Even minor differences in operation, audience, and niche can lead to distinct definitions of sales excellence. However, some strategies are widely applicable for evaluating sales excellence. 

These near-universal metrics are sales performance, organizational alignment, productivity, customer feedback, retention, and growth.

1. Sales Performance
   Sales performance covers a variety of performance indicators, including:

   • Total revenue
     
     
   • Year-over-year growth
     
     
   • Average revenue per account
     
     
   • Market penetration
     
     
   When sales teams consistently meet and exceed these performance metrics, sales excellence ensues, leading to consistent revenue and growth.
2. Organizational Alignment
   Organizational alignment enhances unity between the daily contributions of individuals and the fundamental goals of the company. Optimizing essential business processes, structures, departments, and personnel creates efficient workflows that maximize long-term success.
   
   To improve organizational alignment, start by asking questions like:
   
   
   • How much of the salesforce’s effort actively supports the overarching goals of your company? 
     
     
   • Do individuals, teams, and departments interconnect in an innovative, collaborative environment that supports the company’s interests?

   Achieve strong organizational alignment to develop and maintain sales excellence.

3.  Sales Productivity
   Streamlining sales productivity allows companies to reduce resource expenditure and maximize sales results. Measure sales productivity through various key performance indicators, such as:
   
   
   • Win rate
     
     
   • Conversion rates
     
     
   • Sales length
     
     
   • Deal size
     
     
   • Customer lifetime value
     
     
   • Quota attainment
     
     
   Analyzing sales productivity often gets less priority than measuring sales performance. But failing to gain a thorough understanding of both leaves blind spots in your sales strategies. 
4. Customer Feedback, Retention, and Growth
   Consistently high customer satisfaction feedback significantly increases your company's visibility, market share, profits, and industry authority.
   
   Sales managers and teams that achieve excellence understand how to create genuine connections via active listening and strategic questioning. Mastering these skills develops trust, grows salespeople's customer base through referrals and strong reviews, and increases overall performance.
   
   The ability to foster strong relationships is also crucial for customer retention, an important strategy for any business since repeat customers spend up to 67% more than new clients. 

Four Strategies to Achieve Sales Excellence

Sales excellence underlies your company’s growth, market share, and reputation. When high-quality sales teams operate at full efficiency, previous benchmarks and metrics for success become milestones pushing the salesforce towards new heights.

These are a few strategies to implement to maintain sales excellence in your company:

Invest in Sales Enablement

Sales enablement refers to providing sales representatives with the right tools, resources, and training to efficiently close deals.

One facet of effective sales enablement is connecting sales reps with relevant marketing and content strategies that affect the context of their sale or offering. 

In another valuable sales enablement practice, sales managers provide real-time visibility into customer engagement metrics. This helps your salesforce precisely adjust sales strategies to improve and maintain customer engagement. 

Support a Healthy Sales Culture

Healthy sales culture is a hallmark of collective sales excellence in a team. Healthy sales cultures cultivate:

• Collaboration
  
  
• Innovation
  
  
• Creativity
  
  
• High levels of trust
  
  
• Willingness to learn and evolve

This constructive mindset leads to increased performance and less turnover, advancing the value of your sales team. To develop a healthy sales culture, instill sales management excellence. Strong leadership encourages peer-to-peer recognition, provides ample recognition and celebration, and encourages healthy competition and open communication.

Commit to Consistent Training

To produce sales excellence, ensure your sales team has access to regular training. Training should expand beyond simple selling tips and tricks to include in-depth knowledge and skills that close deals. 

Facilitate study of recent industry insights and trends and educate sales teams on marketing fundamentals and company strategies. Additionally, work on technical skills like how to properly integrate productivity tools into their workflow.

Promote Openness to Change

Ongoing prosperity depends on a commitment to constant evolution and improvement. Unfortunately, many companies stumble on the path to sales excellence due to stagnant sales strategies, channels, and practices. In a rapidly changing world, remaining flexible and learning new sales strategies and tools gives savvy companies an edge over their competitors.

How PerceptionPredict Helps You Achieve Sales Excellence

PerceptionPredict’s cutting-edge predictive analytics identifies sales reps’ Performance Fingerprints. Advanced data mining and statistical algorithms transform raw data into individualized sales ‘sales DNA’ for accurate predictions of key performance indicators.

PerceptionPredict has a proven track record of developing sales excellence. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity technology leader, used our Performance Fingerprints to build a global network of world-class sales teams. This led to a powerful advantage over competitors, culminating in a wildly successful IPO in June of 2019.

Book a demo to learn how PerceptionPredict can put your team on a path to sales excellence.